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January 30, 2013

Is the public cloud the best place for legacy applications?
If an application is due for a refresh, why settle for just a facelift via an incremental hardware upgrade or new GUI? Instead, why not go whole hog and re-platform the application on a state-of-the-art cloud platform that delivers scalable performance, flexibility and resilience—not to mention an operational expenditure (opex) rather than capital expenditure (capex) model?

Using FileTables in SQL Server 2012
FileTables is a new feature introduced in SQL Server 2012. It's a unique table that reflects metadata of files in a specified folder. The file attributes can then be modified either through SQL queries or via Windows Explorer. The two primary benefits of FileTables are the ability to dynamically access file attributes via DML, and to perform FullText search on files in the specified folder. The FileTable feature builds on FileStream and HiearchyID, which were introduced in SQL Server 2008.

Homeland Security: Disable UPnP, as tens of millions at risk
It comes only a few hours after a white paper was released by security researchers at Rapid7, which claimed that approximately 40 to 50 million devices worldwide are vulnerable to infiltration by hackers as a result of a flaw in a networking protocol. UPnP, or Universal Plug and Play, allows devices that connect to networks, to communicate seamlessly with one another and discover each other's presence. Devices can then connect over a network to share files, print documents, and access other shared resources.

Inside Look at Office 2013 for IT Pros: the Right Touch
All of the standard Office applications still exist, but there are some new components as well. One such component is the Lync client. The Lync client isn't new but this is the first time Microsoft has included it in Office. Having the Lync client included with the Office 2013 suite should prove to be handy for organizations that use Office 365 or which have an on-premise Lync Server deployment.

PowerShell 3 Web of Wow, Part 2
Jeffery Hicks's serioes: Last time we looked at one of the new PowerShell v3 cmdlets for working with web data, Invoke-WebRequest. This week we'll look at a cmdlet that I think you'll find even easier to use, Invoke-RestMethod. REST, which stands for Representational State Transfer is being used more and more to deliver web-based data.

New immigration bill focuses on high-skill workers
The Immigration Innovation Act would increase the number of H-1B visas available to U.S. companies from 65,000 a year to 115,000 a year, and would establish an economy-based escalator, allowing the number of H-1Bs to expand or contract, depending on market conditions. The top number of visas allowed would be 300,000 per year.

Free Tool: Automated Testing with Moles and Pex in Visual Studio 2010
Pex is a test generator: aim it at your application and Pex generates test cases for you. Pex does that by examining your code and then generating tests that ensures, among other things, every line gets executed. Pex is particularly interested in generating "edge cases": what happens at the outer limits of the ranges you've built into your code.

Staggering Revelations About Big Data
The report, conveys staggering numbers about the size of our digital universe. Even more telling are details that reveal the wealth of good data out there that remains unexploited by organizations for business purposes. The report is sponsored by EMC, a cloud-based provider of information storage, management, protection and analytics services. (Note: The findings measure big data in a unit of measurement known as the zettabyte (ZB), which equals 1,000 exabytes. That's enough to store 250 billion DVDs, according to an estimate from Cisco.)

Good Technology Unveils Six BYOD Ready Enterprise Mobile Apps
Using Good Dynamics, industry’s most secure application development platform, enterprises/third party developers can build and manage secure business mobile apps that are required for true BYOD adoption by enterprises and employees. Good Technology recently announced availability of six such Mobile Enterprise Apps for iOS secured by Good Dynamics which now add to the available ecosystem of third-party business productivity applications.

Quote for the day:"No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave." -- Calvin Coolidge